I dismounted at the beginning of the drive to the Hall. The potholes were now deadly. It was hard skirting them with Pamela on the back of the bicycle. I whistled under the trees to keep our spirits up, and eventually we reached the old dairy which was alive with the chip of metal on stone.
‘Hello, young’un,’ said a familiar sunburnt face of forty or thereabouts, quizzing us through a rough new gap in the bricks. It was William Kennet, who gardened for Lady Brock. When he wasn’t turning over the grounds to food crops he was busy with Home Guard duties – in this case, fitting the old dairy out with gunsights. So many things, these days, had to be seen to be believed.
‘Morning, Ellen,’ he said. ‘Who’ve you got there?’
‘Morning, Mr Kennet. Sergeant Kennet, I beg your pardon. This is a little girl from Southampton.’ I spoke meaningfully, and he gave a slow nod. ‘Say hello, Pamela!’ I used my brightest tone.
Pamela waved from her perch but said nothing. Her face was pinched. I was hungry, so I knew she must be too.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked William.
‘Giving this old wall a few holes,’ he told her. ‘To make a nice breeze in the dairy.’
‘It must be awfully difficult with that bad hand.’
‘Oh Pamela, that’s not polite.’
William smiled, held out the hand to her. ‘Look, it holds a chisel right well. So I can hammer away with my hammer.’ He made a claw, to show her. His thumb and finger were huge beside hers, calloused and bent from overuse. Behind the finger was a single nub of a third finger, and then nothing. What remained of the palm and back of the hand was bound by scar tissue, now silvered and braided. It was a creation of a shell, during the Great War, at the Battle of Messines. He was a copper-beater before that shell screeched over, a high craftsman, but I never knew him as such. To me he was a gardener, with a potting shed that was a refuge throughout my later childhood, a charcoal stove that was the only warm thing in my life.
Pamela, awed, was mimicking him, trying to make her own claw, her small perfect little forefinger sliding off the soft top of her thumb. ‘Mummy’s still in Southampton,’ she confided to him. ‘But she’s coming to fetch me this afternoon. Do you know, we saw a house with no roof!’
‘Did you now?’ He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘That’s not a lot of use, is it? A house with no roof. Now, Upton Hall certainly has a roof, and a tower too. Wait till you see it.’ He glanced at the bicycle. ‘I’m glad you found a use for that old sheepskin.’
‘It’s not old. It’s lovely. I used to sleep on it when I was tiny.’
‘I know.’ He gave me his square grin. ‘It was me that gave it you, when you were newborn.’
‘Oh, William, how very kind!’ I was astonished. ‘I never knew! I would have thanked you for it long since!’
He shrugged, still smiling. ‘It was a cold winter, and I had it to spare. And your ma and pa thanked me on your behalf, very civilly.’
‘I keep forgetting that you worked for my father.’
‘You were too young to remember. And I wouldn’t call it work. More like a day here and there.’ Mr Kennet tipped his hat with the remains of his right hand. ‘Now, I can’t linger, my dear. Come and have a cuppa when you get time.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said, wondering when I would ever get time.
Lady Brock opened her front door, boots spattered and mackintosh hemmed with mud.
‘Good morning, Ellen. How do you like our defences? Have a care, William Kennet will soon be asking you for the password of the day.’ She came down the steps. ‘I saw you, skirting the quagmires. Sometimes I’m glad Michael’s no longer with us, you know. He wouldn’t have minded the ploughing –’ she indicated, with a wide sweep of her arm, the great pathwayed allotment of ragged, nutritious brassicas and rich, black potato furrows which had replaced her lawns and rose garden ‘– but he’d have loathed the drive. We only needed a few ruts for him to say it looked like bloody St Eloi.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘I do beg your pardon, dear, for my foul language.’
After the Great War Lady Brock’s husband, Sir Michael, had been an ambulant if rather wheezy hero; over the next twenty years the gas had reduced him by increments to a gurgling wraith in a bath chair before killing him in September 1939, ten days into the present war. Lady Brock as usual had a gorgeous rich red on her wide, rather fish-like mouth. The lipstick, plus a feathered hat and a shy, rarely seen beast of a fur coat, constituted all she had of glamour. On the day of Sir Michael’s death, which had been by internal drowning, she had donned them all, to serve as her breastplate, sword and buckler.
Pamela gave her a guarded look. Lady Brock laughed.
‘We’ve come to speak to two of the women who were on the bus,’ I said.
‘Ah. I know the ones you mean. I’m afraid they’ve all gone. They departed en masse at first light, desperate to get home. Like a shoal of salmon. There was nothing I could do to stop them.’ She saw my shoulders sag. ‘Buck up, dear. All is not lost.’ She crouched down in front of Pamela. ‘So you came by bicycle!’
Pamela nodded.
‘Was it your first time?’
Pamela nodded again.
‘That deserves an egg, at the very least,’ said Lady Brock, ‘if not some mashed potato.’
She cooked without removing her mackintosh, flinging cold mashed potato into the sputtering frying pan along with the egg, stabbing unhandily at the mixture with the tip of a long iron spoon. ‘I shan’t disturb Mrs Hicks. She went to see her sister in Cosham and got stuck on a train all night. Caught her absolute death.’ When Pamela was served she picked up a pan containing the remains of a burnt breakfast of porridge. ‘The girls scorched this specially. Come with me, Ellen, while I feed Nipper.’
We stepped outside into the flagstoned yard. Lady Brock scraped the porridge pan into a tin bowl and the dog, a rangy collie with one blue eye, loped out from the empty stables. Upton Hall currently housed Nipper, Mrs Hicks, William Kennet, six land girls and Lady Brock herself. The herds were dispatched, the fields turned to wheat and turnips. ‘I had two hunters in those stables, and now that dog’s the only resident,’ she remarked now, quite cheerfully. ‘I don’t know. What a bloody comedown.’
She knew what had happened to Pamela. The two women on the bus had told her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Pamela doesn’t know which hotel it was. My guests thought it might have been the Crown. The family’s from Plymouth, so they’d have stayed in an hotel.’
Lady Brock banged the spoon in the pan to release the last scraps of porridge and the dog snapped at them as they fell. ‘It was the Crown Hotel. The ladies told me.’
‘Ah. Well.’ I ran my toe along the gap between two flagstones. There was something comforting about the worn edges. ‘I’ll telephone the Crown, then, and the police if need be. And Mrs Pickering, who couldn’t be bothered to mind her own child, will come with tears of joy to us.’
Lady Brock surveyed me, a gentle pike.
‘That was uncharitable of me.’ I felt the blush heat my cheeks. ‘My people were noisy last night.’
‘I didn’t hear mine. I put them in the drawing room and took a spoon of Michael’s mixture.’ Lady Brock’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t breathe a word to Dr Bell but I’ve got some left over. It’s absolutely topping. One doesn’t move a muscle all night. Now, let’s go. Pamela’s scraping the pattern off that plate.’
Pamela and I followed Lady Brock past the ballroom. The chandeliers hung sheeted in canvas from the dim ceiling; the alabaster lions were corralled in some hidden basement, the carpets rolled up and gone. Instead there were a half-dozen rows of trestles bearing camouflage netting for the anti-aircraft batteries. Many of us in Upton came here to weave strips of drab fabric in and out through the mesh of tarred ropes. Our first efforts were returned as ‘insufficiently garnished’ or, as William put it when he saw them, ‘like a pack of dogs with mange. Jerry will see right through ’em and let fly.’ So now we worked until the sides of our hands were rough and sore. Today the room was empty, the half-finished nets hanging forlorn.
‘Aren’t those holey tents,’ Pamela said.